Waters Rankings 2020: Best Outsourcing Service Provider—Eze Castle Integration

Eze Castle Integration (ECI) wins its second category of this year’s Waters Rankings, this time in the best outsourcing service provider category, which must rank as one of the most intensely competitive of all 33 categories on offer.

According to Mary Beth Hamilton, vice president of global marketing at ECI, the firm noted an uptick in demand for outsourced and managed cloud services in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak, with firms looking to offload their commoditized business functions to a specialist provider. “We are seeing firms looking more closely at their cloud adoption strategy, as Covid-19 highlighted the value and flexibility of managed cloud solutions,” Hamilton explains. “As Eze Castle Integration helped clients move from office to remote working models, those operating on a cloud platform were able to smoothly transition their employees to a fully remote environment. Additionally, the flexibility of cloud services allowed them to easily scale IT resources, ensuring users had access to data and applications without performance or availability concerns.”

Hamilton explains that ECI is having more conversations with clients about how cloud-based tools can foster greater collaboration, information sharing and virtual connections now that so many employees are working remotely. “During this period, more and more firms are embracing tools like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive to give employees the constant connectivity they require while also maintaining a strong security posture,” she says.   

Cybersecurity is another area where ECI has seen increased demand, as firms struggle to protect themselves in today’s remote working environment.

For all outsourcing providers, business continuity and operational resilience are critical issues that they absolutely must get right to ensure clients’ services are always available. This was especially the case with Covid-19 and the operational challenges it posed. However, Hamilton says ECI’s business continuity planning and testing practices, coupled with its technology investments, allowed a seamless transition of the firm’s employees to a full remote working model, while simultaneously providing support to its clients. “For our clients, we remain focused on delivering the highest levels of support, availability and security,” she says. “Our more than 10,000 cloud users experienced business-as-usual operations thanks to our expert cloud and service teams who took proactive measures, including automatically increasing bandwidth, to help ensure positive user experiences.”

Past winners of this category include Broadridge Financial Solutions in 2019, while Electra Information Systems won the category in 2017 and 2018.